Confronted with fresh signs of life, pundits who'd brandished shovels at the first sniff of tea party road kill generally declined to confess the obvious, that they'd been too eager to conduct a proper and permanent burial.

On equally scant evidence, you could just as well argue the wilting of the Clinton rose. Last week, Democratic voters in Philadelphia soundly rejected the mother-in-law of former First Daughter Chelsea Clinton, also known as Marjorie Margolies, in her bid for Congress. After Bill and Hill helped Margolies raise money, and the former president even cut an ad for her, Margolies lost to a union-backed Pennsylvania state representative by 36 points.

Big deal.

Meanwhile, two other crucial factors went largely missing from this requiem-for-a-movement discussion.

“There's not that big a difference between what you call the tea party and your average conservative Republican,” he said after incumbents held serve a couple of weeks ago. “We're against Obamacare, we think taxes are too high, we think government is too big.” See? It's a big tent.

Also not to be underestimated: Beginning in April 2010, the IRS froze the applications of nearly 300 organizations seeking tax-exempt status under names containing trigger words: patriot, tea party, 9/12. The IRS' big-footing of tea party applicants shrank conservative outreach efforts in 2012 and reverberates even now.

Nonetheless, tea partiers putter along, evolving stylistically and tactically — surely they wouldn't endorse another shutdown, or duck the general election if their guy isn't nominated — while adhering to their principled, and superior, arguments about limited government.

New to the fray four years ago, tea party activists caught lightning in a bottle. Now they're learning that's not always how it works, and that the other side can hustle, too. Under such circumstances, getting what you want sometimes involves accepting imperfect alliances.